Image from 'Mosue Guard,' copyright David Petersen

My game group played Fudged Mouse Guard a few weeks ago. It takes the excellent Mouse Guard RPG–a game of intelligent mice with medieval-level technology–and converts the system to Fudge (every stat is a score from -4 to +4, and you roll dice that modify your score up or down for a final result, which is compared to a target difficulty).

The original Mouse Guard system is a simplified and heavily modified version of the odd Burning Wheel system. The conversion to Fudge can’t be exact.

It isn’t, but Fudged Mouse Guard fits the world well, and converts all the important statistics. We were able to play in the Mouse Guard world effectively, using skills and abilities, and combat involved simply trading blows. It works.

I did encounter one problem: The Fudged Mouse Guard document lists no example enemies, and provides no guidelines for enemies’ power level. I guessed at the stats for enemies, which turned out to be low. The PCs defeated all their enemies within three rounds. The original RPG’s unique combat system doesn’t translate directly to a traditional RPG’s mechanic of trading blows, so more direction there would be helpful.

Overall, though, the game went smoothly and we had fun. You can view our character sheets to see the stats used in the system.

'CatacombsOfTheWizard' by orkboi on Flickr

Dungeon World is another sword-and-sorcery tabletop RPG system aiming to recapture the purity of classic Dungeons & Dragons. The surface looks the same, including the four classes of Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard. The mechanics and approach, however, are quite different.

Player-character attributes mirror D&D, except for the addition of Bond, which is used to indicate how well each character knows each other character. Moreover, at the beginning of each session, two attributes are “highlighted” by other players and the GM. If a player uses those attributes during the session, the PC gets extra XP.

The basic die mechanic is 2d6, added together, plus any modifiers. 10 or higher is a full success; 7-9 is a success with a complication; 6 or lower is a failure.

The “move,” which is the core procedure of the system, is a rule that lists a trigger (the thing in the game that activates the move), possibly a roll, and a set of possible results.

Interestingly, moves are not optional. If any character action satisfies the trigger condition for a move, the character must immediately use that move.

Moreover, moves are always responses to character actions. A player can’t say “I use the Defy Danger move;” the player must narrate a character action which triggers the Defy Danger move.

This is central to the system. Players must narrate. The mechanics must flow from that narration.

There are also mechanics that allow for results to be held for the next turn, for the next use of a move, until a condition is met, or using a currency called “hold.” The move specifies the uses of “hold.” For example, if you stand in defense of a person, item, or location under attack and succeed fully, you get 3 hold. You can later spend that hold to redirect an attack from the defended item to yourself, or halve the damage of an attack against the defended item, or deal extra damage to anything attacking the defended item.

In a reversal from traditional D&D, most weapons deal no damage themselves. Damage is dealt by rolling a certain sized die for your class, and in some cases adding +1 for a particularly powerful weapon. The system justifies this by pointing out that your class’s training determines your ability to hurt people. Thieves are not build to deal damage; they have moves that make them useful in many other ways.

Unfortunately, the rules are written with often-tortured grammar, making many sentences hard to parse. Here’s an example, and I’ve even corrected two typos: “When the doom you show signs of is an onslaught of goblin arrows, if the players don’t do something to get out of the way, you can follow through with damage as a hard move.” This is frequent enough that I needed to re-read many passages to fully understand them.

I wouldn’t mind this in a supplement, but these are the core rules.

The term “move” compounds the issue. It’s such a generic word that I often felt confused by a particular turn of phrase. When a rule tells you to “make your move,” is that meant colloquially or mechanically?

When we sat down to play it, the game progressed smoothly. I spent much of the time prompting players with “What do you do?”, as the rules demanded, which non-plussed a few players. Dungeon World expects focus, an admirable quality.

much as I’m complaining about it, I found Dungeon World‘s rules and approach refreshing and effective. We had a classic hack-and-slash adventure. It did exactly what it claimed it would do.

'Brother' by linuz90 on Flickr

Man, I loved Fiasco.

Fiasco is a tabletop RPG that approaches die rolls from a radically unorthodox angle. The players roll the dice at the beginning of the game, and those rolls tie into various elements of the setting (the book comes with several starter settings). Once those dice are rolled, they’re never rolled again.

The first half of the game involves describing and explaining the elements rolled, as well as their relations to each other. If the dice connect a child’s chemistry set to a protagonist’s law offices, someone will get a chance to explain that connection at some point before the game’s mid-point.

Halfway into the game comes the Tilt, a major plot point that disrupts the ongoing story and rolls it towards disaster. The rest of the game involves narrating the characters’ reactions and fates.

As a result, Fiasco is a story-driven game, to the point of being story-obsessed. The game hinges on players collaborating to narrate whole scenes without a single die roll, skill, or attribute to fall back on.

Only one in our group of four had played Fiasco before, so he guided us through the dice-rolling and story-telling process. Most of us found the system awkward at first, but we warmed to it, especially in the second half. Our story of a small Southern town and its corrupt cop, his innocent niece, and the drug-dealing lawyer and his daughter quickly spiraled out of the character’s control, into dark places. We felt gripped by the power of our story.

What better praise can I give to a role-playing game?

'Ghost Exit' by rbrwr on Flickr

InSpectres is a lot of fun.

It’s a tabletop role-playinggame that’s basically Ghostbusters. The lightweight system includes only four attributes per PC–Academics, Athletics, Technology, and Contact–with a focus on one of them. A total of 9 points are distributed among these attributes.

The core mechanic involves rollingsix-sideddice–as many dice as you have points in the attribute that applies to the attempted action–and looking up the highest die rolled in a results table. Higher numbers provide extra Job Dice (each job requires the players to collect a certain number of job dice), while lower numbers mean that bad things happen.

Similarly, when faced with something scary or otherwise stressful–which happens a lot to paranormal investigators–the player rolls a number of dice equal to the force of the stress, and lower numbers provide bad results, including the loss of dice from attributes. Once all of a character’s attribute dice are gone, the character freaks out and retires from that particular job (and possibly from the ghostbusting franchise).

That’s most of the system. The franchise itself has a couple of attributes that can be called upon in dire circumstances, and there’s also a “confessional” mechanic, that lets players add facts to the world by narrating an aside,noir-style(“But what we didn’t know was that the tool shed contained an old stick of incense that the ghosts hated!”). And that’s about it, mechanically.

In play, we had a great time. We decided to play a small franchise in New Orleans, that was invited to investigate strange nightly noises in an old government building that once served as the governor’s mansion. The PCs faced down various ghosts wandering the cubicled building before discovering that the top office doubled as a seance chamber. Further paranormal hijinks ensued.

The rules describe a 10-die job as “easy” and a 30-die job as “hard.” We started with a 10-die goal, but within an hour upped the goal to 20, as the players quickly gathered job dice with few ill effects. Indeed, we finished the 20-die mission after losing only a couple of attribute points per player. A 10-die job seems trivial, though perhaps the players were rolling well.

The system’s simplicity let us get to the action quickly, which is critical for a light-heartedgame like this. Moreover, the high-levelmechanics prevented us from bogging down in blow-by-blowcombat.

InSpectres fits its genre almost perfectly. The only downside is that it fits this genre only. However, if bustin’ makes you feel good, I’ve found no system better than InSpectres.